Library Weekly

The ASCL's Library Weekly is our library’s weekly spotlight on African people and events. Inspired by the SciHiBlog, this service is based on information retrieved from Wikipedia and Wikidata and is completed with selected titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue. 

N.B. The weeklies are not updated and reflect the state of information at a given point in time.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009, Source Wikimedia Commons)On 15 September 1977, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young Anglophone authors [which] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature", particularly in her second home, the United States.

Adichie grew up in Nsukka, where both her parents worked at the University of Nigeria, her father as a professor of statistics and her mother as a registrar. After studying medicine for a year at Nsukka, she left for the United States, where she studied communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University (B.A., 2001), creative writing at Johns Hopkins University (Master's degree, 2003) and African history at Yale University (M.A., 2008).

During her senior year at Eastern she started working on her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which was released in October 2003. The book has received wide critical acclaim: it was shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize (2004) and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (2005).

Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, set before and during the Biafran War, was published 2006. It became an international best seller and was awarded the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2007. Half of a Yellow Sun was adapted into a film of the same title directed by Biyi Bandele (2014).

In 2011-2012, Adichie was awarded a fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, which allowed her to finalize her third novel, Americanah. It was selected by The New York Times as one of "The 10 Best Books of 2013".

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has received numerous awards and distinctions including 10 honorary doctorates.

Source: WikipediaChimamanda Ngozi Adichie Official Website, the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website (maintained by Daria Tunca, University of Liège).

Selected publicactions

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Notes on grief / Amanda N. Adichie. - London : Fourth Estate, 2021

Dear Ijeawele, or, A feminist manifesto in fifteen suggestions / Amanda N. Adichie. - New York [etc.] : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017

We should all be feminists / Amanda N. Adichie. - London : Fourth Estate, 2014
Nederlandse vertaling ; TED Talk 2012

Americanah / Amanda N. Adichie. - London : Fourth Estate, 2013

The thing around your neck / Amanda N. Adichie. - London : Fourth Estate, 2009

Half of a yellow sun / Amanda N. Adichie. - London : Fourth Estate, 2006
Film

You in America / Amanda N. Adichie. - Nairobi : Kwani Trust, cop. 2006

Purple hibiscus : a novel / Amanda N. Adichie. - Chapel Hill : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003

For love of Biafra / Amanda N. Adichie. - Ibadan [etc.] : Spectrum Books [etc.], 1998

About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her works

Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / edited by Daria Tunca. - Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2020]

A companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / Ernest Emenyo̲nu. - Woodbridge, Suffolk, (GB) : James Currey, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2017

For a detailed bibliography, see “The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Website” maintained by Daria Tunca (English Department, University of Liège).

 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story, TED Talk, 2009

 

Timeline of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie via Wikidata and Scholia

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